A Hanseatic merchant was jailed for debt in Bruges for years, died weeks after release, and his widow was sued out of her house

Hildebrand Veckinchusen was born about 1365, probably in Dorpat, now Tartu, Estonia. He traded from Bruges and became a citizen of Lübeck around 1400. In 1407 he, his brother Sivert and ten other merchants formed a company to trade overland with Venice. It was the first known Hanseatic company of its kind. It borrowed too much and failed; court cases in Lüneburg in 1414 record the collapse. In 1416 he joined a loan to King Sigismund and never got his share back. In February 1422 a Genoese banker had him jailed in the Bruges debtors' tower over a debt of 120 pounds Flemish. Friends freed him in April 1426 with a guarantee from his son-in-law, Peter van dem Damme. He sailed for Lübeck on 1 May 1426 and died weeks later. His widow, Margarete, had seven children with him. Sivert's mother-in-law sued her out of her house, and she lost it. Sivert gave her only enough to keep the family from begging. Hildebrand's 12 account books and more than 600 letters, 1398 to 1428, ended up in Tallinn. A Tallinn archivist presumes the town council took them into custody while settling the estates of relatives in Livonia^†. They were found in 1879 under a layer of peppercorns. UNESCO added them to its Memory of the World register on 18 May 2023.